Blogroll Suggestions Tumbling In

Getting lots of suggestions for the Achenblogroll, but first let's talk about food. My grand strategic plan for this blog (above and beyond killing it as soon as possible) is to make it increasingly focused on food, to the point of obsession. No longer will people say this blog has a pointlessness problem. No: We'll be about food, and meals we ate, and restaurants we like, and Early Bird Specials we've discovered, and so on. Every blog post about food will end with the question: Where will we eat next? My Mom can become one of our special guest kit writers, with her tips on good digestive health. We will spend at least one day a week debating oatmeal.

I've got food on the brain because this is a good-eatin' time of year -- the corn so sweet it dudn't need butter, the farmgrown mayters with that natural tang you can't get the rest of the year, plus all the good seafood leaping out of the bay, needing only a little heat and garlic butter to give you that perfect taste of summer. In penance for the surf-and-turf feast I prepped last night I am now choking down one of the pitiful, mouth-desiccating bagels from the Starbucks near my office.

On to the blog suggestions. Here are a few emails that came across the transom [note old-guy lingo -- get me rewrite!] this weekend:

"Joel, may I humbly nominate my own blog for your blogroll? It's called Panabasis. It started as the online journal for the Janus Museum, where I "work", but has slowly expanded to
include my photography, my cat's photography (he has his own camera),
movie reviews, historical anecdotes, recipes, and a fair amount of
Richard Thompson content and even some local DC items, particularly when
I get questioned by the Capitol Police. I have a link to your blog, too,
which has probable generated a good dozen or so visits for you.

Dear Allan: You kind of lost me at "my cat's photography," but it does look like an entertaining blog. I worship Richard Thompson, DC Blogs looks good, but the Pinky Diablo thing strikes me as -- well, eccentric. Though I invested only about 1.25 seconds looking at it. Bibliodyssey looks like it will teach me a lot about medieval manuscripts.

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The Movable Buffet: Worth a read if you care about Vegas and the shenanigans there, such as the Hard Rock trying to team up with porn star Tera Patrick. The blog is part of the LA Times.

--

Jolene Galegher writes:

"Here are three possibilities to add to your blogroll.

1. James Fallows, blogging on The Atlantic web site. Fallows is, of course, well-known and deservedly so. His passions are aviation, computers, and politics, broadly construed. He writes about all three on his blog. There's generally one post of several paragraphs/day, although sometimes he goes several days w/o adding anything new. He and his wife are currently living in China, so there are many interesting observations about politics, economics, culture, and everyday life there. He just finished a series of five posts in a series called "We Are Ready!", which is about China's readiness (or lack of it) to host the Olympics. Should be many more interesting posts on related topics in the coming weeks. Fallows is a wonderful writer--intelligent, well-informed, witty, humane.

2. Nancy Nall - (AKA Nancy Nall Derringer). Nancy is one of the people thrown off by the shrinking newspaper industry. A former columnist for the Fort Wayne, IN News-Sentinel, she was downsized, as was her husband Alan Derringer. He is now a copy editor at the Detroit Free Press (I believe), and NN is a freelancer. (In fact, she had a piece in the Post re Indiana around the time of the primary this past spring.) Her blog is about whatever she happens to be doing/thinking about. Could be dinner; could be national politics; could be the turmoil in contemporary journalism; could be the agony of chaperoning a field trip for 10-year-olds. Most days, her posts are partly reports on what's up w/ her and partly links to interesting/funny/outrageous things she's come across. (The Post is a frequent source of "bloggage". Weingarten and Steuver are among her favorites.) A very sane person w/ an excellent sense of humor and a good writer. She also has a nice community of readers. Some of them are people she knew in her past life in FW or elsewhere; others are people who, in one way or another, found their way to her site and made themselves at home. She envisions her commenters sitting at barstools with conversations initially sparked by her posts, but then developing in new directions as people respond to each other. She is on vacation just now, and the past week was a little shaky. You may want to read back a couple weeks to get a better sense of the whole.

3. Wife in the North - Judith O'Rielly. I don't read this everyday, but it can be quite charming. The conceit that drives the whole enterprise is the author's not entirely willing transformation from an urbane PR professional in London into a "wife in the North," a consequence of a decision, made largely at her husband's urging, to decamp for a rural community in Northumberland. So, the blog is about marital compromise, motherhood (under stress), feeling isolated and out of place, fixing up an old house, dealing w/ three small children in a not entirely welcoming environment, and all things related."